We are rolling out about 30 departmental web sites on SharePoint 2010 for our intranet. They all use a common look-and-feel and have publishing pages. The users have capability to edit pages and lists, but not create new lists/pages. Many of the publishing pages have simple list views.

What is a non-technical way to train the editors for these sites? For example, what's a good way to explain the concept of lists and libraries? How do we explain publishing pages to folks who are subject matter experts in other areas but not in IT?

We have about 1 hour for each training session, where we need to explain the concept of SharePoint as well as show them the custom page layout we've created. Then we will work with the users to migrate their existing content from the old intranet to their SharePoint web sites.

2 Answers
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In think you should focus on new Sharepoint 2010 web content management capabilities and how they may fit their strategic website objectives. Below are some points to consider when you start planning your end user training!

Training them on how to work with document libraries and creating, modifying and filtering of views.

Regarding the custom page layouts, here the focus of should be to manage the complete life cycle of the content– creation, approval, updating & content repurposing - without any coding effort. Adhere to complex regulatory and compliance needs without creating bottlenecks in the approval process.

One very important point to consider is that SharePoint 2010 has a total new interface on the user side: it has the ribbon as we know it from Office 2007. A lot of companies are still running Office 2003, and will probably hold on upgrading until Office 2010 is available. These people have never seen the ribbon before! the ribbon is “security trimmed”, but where in MOSS 2007 any option that you did not have access to was hidden, it is grayed out in SP 2010. This gives some very strange results if you only have read access: you get a ribbon full of disabled buttons. Some functions are less accessible than before, e.g. the content types. It requires some extra clicks to get where you want.

Provides familiarisation with SharePoint by giving a summary of web parts

Start with some skeleton process documents for editors to run through - common tasks like setting up lists and pages.

Let them explore and get them to note down what they have found useful. You will find this will build a handy knowledge base and users will feel they have contributed to building a valuable enterprise platform (which they have).

There are so many different ways of doing things in SharePoint if you see something done one way which looks good, point it out and use it as an example.

Target one or two editors from each business unit to be the "gurus" who can answer simple editing questions and help others learn along the way.

Allowing users to explore is by far the best way for them to learn. Perhaps set up a sandpit environment where users can test their ideas without interfering with their sites.